Let's be thankful for sticky summers

Glynn Moore

Monday

Aug 27, 2007 at 6:00 AM

Several years ago, after visiting her sister in Oklahoma my wife returned home and immediately went outside to kiss the hot, humid air in our backyard.

At Mona's Oklahoma home, the days had been even hotter than the scorchers we're accustomed to - if you can believe that - and more stifling than the No-Pest Strip stickiness of our own Georgia summers.

Shortly after that, we received a phone call from Mona one night. She was in the safety of her "fraidy-hole," a tiny storm shelter beneath the floor of her house for use during tornadoes - which, in Tornado Alley, is a lot.

In addition to twisters and heat, Mona has lived through other natural nasties. During one ice storm, her house was without electricity for a week. Other times, her home is plagued by drought or wind.

Recently her state, like Ohio and Iowa, has flooded from excessive rain. If Mona called us and reported a volcano in her living room, we would not question (what's left of) her sanity.

Mona used to live in Texas, and it's a good thing she isn't there now. It rained so many days straight that some Texans were born, learned to walk and entered third grade without once having seen the sun.

Before that, Mona lived in Missouri. She has showed us photos of snows so harsh that she had to put food into their refrigerator to warm it up.

Three years ago, my wife and I met a couple in Savannah, Ga., who had left those crystalline skies of Missouri for the sunny South. Why Savannah? we asked.

The man told us that during one particular blizzard, he had crawled under his house to thaw the pipes and restore running water. When he touched the metal plumbing, his skin stuck as tight as a tongue to a flagpole.

After he escaped with his life and some of his skin, he and his wife vowed to leave the cold behind. They went online and found two possible new homes. One was Savannah; the other, New Orleans. The next year, a hurricane named Katrina made their choice seem brilliant.

Everywhere we look, Mother Nature has lost control. Pick up the paper on any given day and you might read about an extremely rare tornado in New York City, or flooding in Great Britain so severe that it turned Stonehenge into a fish habitat.

Wildfires have leveled houses on the West Coast and as close to home as the south Georgia swamps. An earthquake devastated part of Peru. A hurricane hit Mexico. Chicago was bowled over by strong winds (again).

What I'm saying is that it's not so bad where we live, after all. Sure, this summer registered well above 100 degrees for days and days and days, and the humidity gave its 110 percent effort, but things could be much worse.

Even when bad storms pass through our area, they generally skirt my house and sneak across the state line into South Carolina. (Sorry, neighbor.)

Sometimes it rains so hard that our drivers don't know how to act, but they don't anyway, and we've had more drought than downpour in recent years.

Sometimes it gets cold in winter - but nothing that would cement a homeowner to his plumbing.

Except for the heat, humidity and drought, about the worst I can say about our weather is the thunder and lightning that send our dog into conniption fits.

I think we should stop complaining about whatever bad weather we have. We should give thanks for our relatively fortunate lot, praise our own little pocket of global warming and pray for those not quite so lucky.

While we're at it, help me put in a good word for Mona. She could stand to catch a break.